How to Download YouTube Transcripts from the Command Line (curl)

Plain text in one command

Create a free key in the dashboard (100 transcripts, no card) and export it. format=text returns the transcript without timestamps; leave format out for JSON.

export TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY="ts_live_..."

curl -s "https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?url=5f3Pn-N6yLc&format=text" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY"

Subtitle files and translation

Use format=srt or vtt with -o to save a file, and translate_to to translate it into one of 150+ languages. --fail makes curl exit non-zero on an error instead of saving the error body.

curl -s --fail -o captions.es.srt \
  "https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?url=5f3Pn-N6yLc&format=srt&translate_to=es" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY"

Pick fields from the JSON with jq

curl -s "https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?url=5f3Pn-N6yLc" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY" \
  | jq -r '.segments[] | "\(.start | floor)s  \(.text)"'

Download a list of videos

Put one video ID or link per line in videos.txt. Failed requests aren't billed, so the loop just reports them and moves on.

mkdir -p transcripts
while read -r video; do
  id=$(basename "$video" | sed 's/.*v=//; s/[?&].*//')
  curl -s --fail -o "transcripts/$id.txt" \
    "https://transcript-yt.com/v1/transcript?url=$id&format=text" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY" || echo "failed: $video"
done < videos.txt

Whole playlists and channels

List a playlist's or channel's videos with /v1/playlist and feed the IDs into the loop above. The channel and playlist guide covers it end to end, and the docs list every parameter.

curl -s "https://transcript-yt.com/v1/playlist?url=https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TRANSCRIPTYT_KEY" \
  | jq -r '.videos[].videoId' > videos.txt